March 03, 2015

One of the great dreams of early modern flight was to get across the Atlantic. In the decade+ before the first non-stop transatlantic crossing many plans were presented for making it across the Atlantic with stops. The problem of course was where the "stopping" would take place. Popular Mechanics presented two of these ideas in 1925: one was the floating airport, a series of four 1200' long and 250' wide aviation harbors on the high seas, four of which would be necessary to get aircraft across the ocean. The other were aerial sky harbors, with zeppelins outfitted as aircraft carriers in the clouds.

These proposals look like less-than-fresh ideas in 1927 when Lindbergh makes his flight, and obsolete by the early 'thirties when several airlines offered transatlantic service. Anyway given the available technology the ideas were not half-bad, though the technology would overtake the necessity for these ideas idea pretty quickly. Considering that we go from the Wright flight in 1903 to transatlantic flight in 30 years, the speed of technological advancement was really pretty extraordinary.

March 02, 2015

"Nets Launched on Rockets to Snare Airplanes" ran the header on this article from Popular Mechanics (volume 44, July 1925). "Nets fastened between parachutes and shot high into the air with shells or rockets are being tested by anti-aircraft branches of the Japanese army and navy as snares for airplanes..." Evidently the plan was to locate the approaching plane and fire these things in their vicinity and hope for the aircraft to find and run into that speck of net occupying .00001% of the sky.

February 09, 2015

Percy Pilcher was a true aviation pioneer who met his end very early, during an event that probably shouldn't have happened, killed by in 30'-fall in 1899. He was creative, and figured out a way to address the knotty problem of lift vs. wing dimensions vs. weight, coming to a tri-plane design in 1898, but was killed before he could fly it in public. His death comes about two years after this appearance in Nature magazine, which tells a quietly dramatic and essentially sotto voce story about attempted soaring flight. It seems so extraordinary to me because--aside from needing a fit of genius to try to figure out the physics of flight, there was a lot that could be done with canvas, pipes, fishing line, and boy-power. When I read this account I could literally feel that soft breeze that he looked for on my teeth--few pieces of major histories of technology get this close to the "common person".

Someone made this nice, short video from the seven stills, perhaps making this one of the earliest "movies" of an human in flight:

"At the time of the flight here illustrated the wind was so light and variable in direction that an ascent from even the elevated position taken up was almost impossible. Means however were at hand by which one end of a thin fishing line 600 yards long could be attached to the machine while the other end passed through two blocks placed close together on the ground at a distance from the aero plane of about 550 yards. These blocks were so arranged that a movement of the aerial machine in the horizontal direction corresponded to a fifth of the movement of the boys pulling the line."

"The start was made at a given signal the line being pulled by three boys and Mr Pilcher gradually left the ground and soared gracefully into the air attaining a maximum height of about 70 feet... A safe and graceful landing was made at a distance of 250 yards from the starting point. The photographs illustrate that part of the flight previous to the attainment of the greatest height...if the machine had been fitted with a small engine or motor to give (this) amount of thrust by means of a screw or otherwise perhaps an equal or further distance would have been covered."

"Mr Pilcher now proposes to employ as soon as possible a small and light engine indicating about four horsepower this being considerably more than sufficient for flights of moderate length. It is however thought advisable to have rather too much than too little power to commence with as a factor of safety. With this improvement it is hoped that further distances will be covered and a nearer approximation to a flying machine will be attained."

January 27, 2015

This drawing comes from the great engineering classic that presented the prototype jet engine for all that would follow it--J.G. Keenan's Elementary Theory of Gas Turbines and Jet Propulsion. It was published in the glorious Oxford blue cloth by the university and issued with the classically-design beige dust wrapper--it just has the feel of something solid and astute. Keenan's work is a classic--it is a general survey of developments in the jet propulsion field and was among the very first books published on the subject.

Keenan was not the first though to the jet engine party--Hans von Ohain and Sir Frank Whittle were. It was a classic idea-in-the-air example of two people working on a very similar idea at the same time without any knowledge of the other. von Ohain was the first to produce an operational jet engine (1939) while Whittle was the first to patent (while getting his engine to be operational in 1941). Jet engines have been around for a long time (Romans having legislation on the use of variable jet sprays in water distribution) in different forms--fountains, fire hoses, marine jet propulsion (reaching back to 1871), and so on. But John Gregory Keenan's book--that was a big and influential review, a major contribution to the field.

January 23, 2015

This is a survivor of some sort, found at the bottom of a box of German aviation pamphlets--I'm sorry that it is in this condition, but at least there is some of it that remains, because the design is quite striking. It comes in the 24th year of the publication Luftfahr(t), Deutsche Luftfahrer Zeitschrift, and published in 1920. It is just the cover of one issue, and I expected to see a fuller image of the thing online thinking it not to be so uncommon, but I couldn't find any, which I thought unusual. And so I share this rag-tag copy.

January 21, 2015

This is the detail from the cover of Richard Knoller's (professor at the Technischen Hochschule in Vienna) Ueber Laengsstabilitaet der Drachenflugzeuge, published in 1911. In real the image is only about an two inches wide and spare-but-detailoed, wisely placed in the center of the oversized pamphlet, and set in a lofty blank space. Brilliant.

January 11, 2015

Here's an interesting and lovely little classic: A. Ritter v. Miller-Hauenfels Der mühelose Segelflug der Vögel und die segelnde Luftschiffahrt als Endziel hundertjährigen Strebens. (Roughly “The effortless gliding of birds and the sailing airships as the ultimate goal for the end of the century”).The matieral was delivered (January 18th) 1890 at the Polytechnischen Club in Graz and publisahed later that yer in Vienna by Spielhagen & Schurich. My copy of this work also happens to have been in the collection of Vicktor Silberer, 1846-1924, a pioneer aviator from Vienna and a prolific author, jorunalist, and politician.

In his lectures at Graz Miller-Hauenfels looks at the possibility of human (non-powered, gliding) flight via forward-progression bird flight, basing his work on that of Marey, Lilienthal and Parseval.

October 03, 2014

"Let no man seek / Henceforth to be foretold what shall befall / Him or his children.Milton," Paradise Lost XI, 770-72

George Cruikshank--the gifted English cartoonist/satirist/caricaturist and social commentator--was readying his viewers to some hyperspeculative dreams on the possibilities of near-in-time powered flight. Steampunk air travel is so commonplace in the near future that there are departure stations on building-tops

This etching by George Cruikshank "Air-um Scare-um Travelling," from The Comic Almanack (1843), satirizes speculative hopes for balloon flight. The banners hanging from the departure-tower advertise pleasure trips from England to suitably fashionable and exotic locales: daily to Peking, Canton, Mont Blanc, and "every quarter hour" to the birthplace of modern ballooning, Paris. In the lower-left background, one flying machine explodes in mid-air--even in this aeroborne soliloquy to the future, there was more than a touch of danger.

October 02, 2014

"Similitude of Substance will cause Attraction, where the Body is wholly freed from the Motion of Grauity."-- Bacon,Sylua Syluarum, 1626

It seems that in variations of the future that I have read that the concept of anti-gravity-something wasn't taken so much seriously as it was a half-prank. For example earlier in this blog I wrote about one of Edison's least-known and most-nonexistent inventions, antigravity underpants. There was a time in the late 19th century when it was seen that Thomas Edison could do just about anything--so much so that the Brits in The London Punch gave him tongue-in-cheek credit for inventing (flying, so to speak), anti-gravity underwear. The funny thing about this though is that the best thing that people could do with this new invention would be to go to a super-sized art gallery to look at paintings close to the ceiling.

Another example of gravity taken not-so-heavily is the scientific publication, Electrical Experimenter, where a seated couple is no longer so in the clutches of "suspended gravitation", and again what the floating people engage in is play, the oman blowing a balloon and the man spraying selzter at it.

The odd bit here is that "gravity" is found early on in the Oxford English Dictionary back to 1622 with G. de Malynes and N. Carpenter in 1625, and then of course with Roger Bacon a year later), though "anti-gravity" does not occur in use until 1945; and clearly the concept is on display in these three quick examples, though the phrase is not. "Anti-gravitation" however is used, though for some reason it is not included in the OED.

The article, "Overoming Gravitation" by George Piggott, really did take the matter seriously, in spite of the cover illustration, as a quick read will verify. More serious than that, though was an earlier and perhaps war-infested thinking mode was the militarily enhanceable anti-gravity ray (May, 1916).

[Image source: Airminded, in a post about future weapons of the past, here.]

Better yet (?) is this appearance in 1918 of an anti-gravity craft with invisibility options:

And then of course there are examples like this, found in another early post on this blog, "Anti-gravity Atomic-powered Sun-fed Underground Woman of the Year 5000!", here.

In any event, these are a few example of the anti-gravity idea in the 1880-1920 period. No doubt there is a rich and full literature on this very thing--mainly what I wanted to do here was captued Airmnded's image to use for another day.

September 08, 2014

This lovely design occurs on a pamphlet written by Albert Ritter v. Miller-Hauenfels (1818-1897), Der mühelose Segelflug der Vögel und die segelnde Luftschiffahrt als Endziel hundertjährigen Strebens, or, roughly “The effortless gliding of birds and the sailing airships as the ultimate goal for the end of the century”). The booklet was presented 18 January 1890 by the Polytechnischen Club in Graz, and published in Wien by Spielhagen & Schurich later that year.

In his lectures at Graz Miller-Hauenfels looks at the possibility of human (non-powered, gliding) flight via forward-progression bird flight, basing his work on that of Marey, Lilienthal and Parseval. It is a sky-above-mud-below moment, as Miller-Hauenfels was a mining engineer and supervisor, spending much of his time with his mind in and under the earth. And then there, in the not-so-backish-background, was his other thinking, which place him far above the ground.

June 16, 2014

There's a pair of short notices in two consecutive issues of Nature (September 22 and 29, 1910) that brings up a probably mostly-overlooked bit of thinking by Charles Darwin's (and Francis Galton's) grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802). Way before Charles (born 1809) and Francis (born 1822) Erasmus was a powerhouse Darwin, and a powerhouse-in-general. He was primarily a physician, but was also an inventor, physiologist, abolitionist, botanist, and inventor, among other things. He famously speculated on evolution, and less-famously on the coming of the steam age.

In the first article here, pointing out a piece in The Times by R. Meldola, it is shown that Darwin saw the coming of steam from a good distance away: “As the specific levity of air is too great for the support of great burthens by balloons, there seems to be no probable method of flying conveniently but by the power of steam, or some other explosive material, which another half-century may probably discover”.) The editors of Nature included the notice to provide a bit more evidence of Darwin's vision via his poetry, stating that he “foretold, in the following lines, the advent of aerial navigation”:

In the next issue of Nature there's a short notice by Arthur Platt, “Erasmus Darwin on Flying Machines”, (page 397 of September 29, 1910), where he quotes Dawin on the coming of powered flight: “As the specific levity of air is too great for the support of great burthens by balloons, there seems to be no probable method of flying conveniently but by the power of steam, or some other explosive material, which another half-century may probably discover”.

That's pretty good. Over at the Erasmus Darwin House site is another interesting side of Darwin's interest in flight, where it is found in hi snotebooks a good and early understanding of teh mechanics of bird flight:

"In the 18th century there was still no satisfactory explanation for the mechanics of flight and, inquisitive by nature, Darwin appears to have set himself to the task. Sketched out in his commonplace book in 1777 at the height of the 18th century quest for automata and artificial life, the bird (technically a goose) will be brought to life in a steam punk style reminiscent of the era. Using a small reservoir of compressed air as the in-flight rewinding mechanism in the book, Darwin’s description of a bird’s flight is very close to reality, and appears to be the first complete account of a power-plant and the necessary cycle of the wings’ movement..."--Erasmus Darwin House, here.

April 10, 2014

This is perhaps the earliest image of a flying observatory, appearing rapidly in print in the same year as the revolutionary first flight by the Montgolfier brothers. It isn't a "space" station, of course, but it was close to being one in the 18th century. (The title of the work:Lettre à M. de ***. Sur son projet de voyager avec la sphere aërostatique de M. de Montgolfier. Avec figure, which was printed in Paris by Marchands de Feuilles Volantes in 1783.) From what we can see of the platform there is an astronomer, someone taking notes, barrels of provisions, and five crew members operating an air pump, as well as two sheds.

The interesting quote at the bottom from Virgil's (Aeneid vi) "sed revocure gradum hoc opus hic labor est" and in English, "It is easy into Hell to fall, but to get back from thence is all".

It does remind me some of the Nadar "le Geant" balloon, which was a six-bedroom monster that saw only two flights before crashing--it was however the largest thing ever to fly up to that point. (Nadar was the first person to make aerial photographs among many other photo-firsts--and outside that he was the first to host an Impressionist exhibit of art.)

October 25, 2013

These Air Wonder Stories magazine covers are just absolutely delightful--full of abolute hope and belief in the possibilities of what the future might bring i the forms o fair travel. THe first shows an enormous jet-powered craft that is breaking through a waterspout, seemingly undisturbed.

October 10, 2013

(I'm back to the blog after a two-week hiatus for moving to our new house--that is the longest period by far of not writing in the 5.5 years of this blog. This is just a quick post on an interesting and newly-found image--writing should start very soon...)

Beginning to unpack from our move, the very first thing to emerge from the very first ("desk") box out in the studio was a clutch of cut-away aviation images. And the first of those was this beautiful 1948 two-parter from LIFE magazine of the new PanAm B-377 Stratocruiser. The Stratocruiser was first flown in 1947 and was a derivative of the B-29 (troop transport) Superfortress via the C-97 Stratofreighter. Aside from the general opulence, the dark-blue background of this image is just lovely.